Philadelphia Flyers: Pronger still dealing with concussion symptoms

Philadelphia Flyers captain Chris Pronger puts his hand over his eyes as he heads for the locker room after being struck in the face with a stick during the first period of an NHL hockey game with the Toronto Maple Leafs, Monday, Oct. 24, 2011, in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Tom Mihalek)

VOORHEES, N.J. — He was smart and a little snarky. Enlightening and somewhat frightening. With 15 months of bottled up emotions behind him, what Chris Pronger mostly brought with him to a Skate Zone microphone Thursday afternoon was a somewhat surprising willingness to lay himself bare.

“It’s an awkward feeling,” Pronger said about life with concussion symptoms that won’t go away. “It’s something where if you haven’t experienced it before, you don’t understand what (the doctor) is talking about. But it can be debilitating. I guess the biggest part is the depression. How you feel about yourself. How you feel about the injury and how dark you go down.”

Since the after-effects of a couple of unfortunate on-ice collisions early in the 2011-12 season, Pronger, the erstwhile captain of the Flyers, has been forced to learn all about symptoms that too many athletes find themselves battling.

Dizziness. Fatigue. Chronic headaches. Blurred vision. Irritability. Lack of sleep. He’s had it all and thensome.

Advertisement

Nothing compares to the deep depression that has resulted. The state of mind that moved Pronger’s wife, Lauren, to tear up during an interview at the 2012 Flyers Wives Carnival when talking about how her husband’s behavior had been altered, and not for the better.

All because of the blanketing sense of melancholy that Chris Pronger says he’s still battling.

“Things happen for a reason,” Pronger said. “You sit there and you’re depressed and you can wallow and do the why-me. I’m sure I did for a few months when I didn’t really do anything, but eventually you have to kind of turn the page and start trying to get better and start working out and doing the right thing to make sure you’re there for your kids and your wife.”

Pronger has sons aged 10 and 8, and a 4-year-old daughter. His daily routine, he’s happy to say, includes “carpooling them around.” But dealing with his kids, he admits, has turned out to be one of the most difficult things for him to deal with.

“You get agitated very quickly,” Pronger said. “When the symptoms start piling up, you start getting a headache and it’s loud in the house; there’s bright lights. Kids are running around screaming, all that stuff, you are on edge as it is. You’re pissed off that you are not playing the game you love, that you can’t go do what you want to do every day. Then you are even more pissed off because you’ve got a headache and it’s getting worse and worse and you’re lightheaded and dizzy and your kid comes over and you snap.

“You’re not being the father you want to be,” Pronger added. “It changes your personality a little bit. I’ve gotten a little better with it. But I still get a ‘grrr’ on from time to time, and I’ve got to catch myself, take myself out of the room and make sure I’m a little better.”

Pronger’s problems are essentially two-fold. He traces the bulk of his symptoms to when he was hit in the eye in Toronto by the stick of the Maple Leafs’ Mikhail Grabovski, who was following through with a shot in a game Oct. 24, 2011. Pronger missed six games with that, returned to play five more. But he got banged into the boards Nov. 17 in Phoenix, and after playing one more game went out of the lineup with what the Flyers first termed a virus but what was subsequently revealed as concussion symptoms.

After that, he said, “I sat around for five or sixth months doing nothing.” Progress since then has come, but very slowly. He said he misses the camaraderie of a locker room, the daily routine of hockey season, which is all he’d known for nearly 20 years.

“I’ve made improvements,” Pronger said. “I still get symptoms with loud noises and a lot of moving parts, bright lights, things like that. Not to the level it was.

“There’s a lot of things that have gotten better. My eye is still troubling. It’s not working properly. I don’t have peripheral vision, I don’t have a lot of the things that have worked well for me in the past.”

What he has, however, is the love and support of his family, and along with carpooling chauffer, has another job of sorts.

He “helps out” in a player development role for old friend Paul Holmgren and coach Peter Laviolette. Maybe as the symptoms continue to slowly clear, that role could be expanded.

“I watch some of our games and just give (Holmgren) some feedback about on things he might want to work on,” Pronger said. “Or help players out. See little things on the ice that might help them out. That’s pretty much what I’m doing right now.”

Pronger has been placed on the long-term injured reserve list, which enables the Flyers to hack nearly $5 million off their salary cap. All Pronger can’t do is retire. He’s under contract through the 2015-16 season.

Yet he says he wouldn’t retire, anyway. His unplanned press conference Thursday came complete with a press release where University of Pittsburgh Medical Center concussion specialist Michael Collins not only called Pronger a model patient ... he also said Chris Pronger should never consider playing hockey again.

“I have some vulnerabilities that (Collins is) very worried about,” Pronger said. “That may or may not go away. No matter how long it takes, I have to get healthy. That’s my main focus and goal.

“It will be difficult, but the good things in life are never easy. You have to set goals and try to push yourself to attain them and reach them. This is no different. I have to keep working at getting healthy and working to get myself back to as close to 100 percent as I can get, and we’ll kind of re-evaluate after that.”

It’s all Chris Pronger can do. That, and keep working on his patience skills.